Joseph F. Smith

“As a child I knew the Prophet Joseph Smith. As a child I have listened to him preach the gospel that God had committed to his charge. . . . I have retained the witness of the Spirit that I was imbued with, as a child, and that I received from my sainted mother, the firm belief that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God; that he was inspired as no other man in his generation, or for centuries before, had been inspired; that he had been chosen of God to lay the foundations of God’s Kingdom as well as of God’s Church; that by the power of God he was enabled to bring forth the record of the ancient inhabitants of this [the American] continent, to revive and to reveal to the world the doctrine of Jesus Christ. . . . As a child I was impressed, deeply, with the thought, and firmly with the belief, in my soul that the revelations that had been given to and through Joseph the Prophet, as contained in this book, the Book of Doctrine and Covenants, were the word of God, as were the words of the ancient disciples when they bore record of the Father and of the Son” (Gospel Doctrine, 5th ed. [1939], 493).